2022 Lifetime Achievement Award Clarence Major
It is one of the greatest honors of my career to have a small part in the induction of Clarence Major, an incredibly accomplished writer and visual artist, as winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Georgia Writers. I am truly delighted.
I had the same honor last year when Clarence was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, and I hope you will allow me to use some of the same words now that I did then.
Just listing Major’s literary accomplishments in a career approaching seven decades would probably take an hour or more. I first read his work half a century ago when I bought an anthology called Dices or Black Bones: Black Voices of the Seventies at the University of Georgia Bookstore. The book had come out in 1970, the year before I bought it. And I was immediately taken by his poetry.
From that day forward, I looked for his work, bought it when I could, listened to a voice like none other I had ever heard. I later learned he was also a novelist, short story writer, and a highly accomplished and recognized visual artist.
Clarence Major was born in Atlanta on Dec. 31, 1936, and he spent the first seven years of his life in Georgia, before moving with his mother and sister to Chicago where he grew up. But his roots are deep in Georgia, and his mother was from Lexington in Oglethorpe County.
By the time he was 14, Major was writing poetry and short stories and drawing and painting. He knew almost from the beginning that he was destined for a life in the arts, and Chicago offered him opportunities.
About the same time, he attended a famous exhibit in Chicago of the work of Vincent Van Gogh, and Clarence wrote this in retrospect: “I was not sophisticated enough to know how to articulate for myself what these things were doing to me, but I knew I was profoundly moved.”
He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago during his teens, and when he graduated from high school, he joined the Air Force in 1955. Among his postings was one in Valdosta, Ga. When he finished his military duty, he returned to Chicago, from where he began to publish in little magazines and then his first books of poetry and fiction. He also started a literary magazine and began a lifelong effort to connect with the writers and artists of his own time.
And he has kept a steady stream of prose, poetry, and painting for decades. He is the author of 11 novels, two collections of short stories, 16 volumes of poetry, and 10 books of non-fiction. He has also edited four anthologies, and he has had numerous solo shows of his artwork, as well as participating in a large number of group shows.
After earning bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees, Major set out on an academic career that brought him in contact with students and writers around the globe. He taught literature and/or creative writing at many colleges and universities, especially a long stint at the University of Colorado, which he left in 1989, and at the University of California-Davis where he taught for 18 years before his retirement in 2007. Also, on a Fulbright-Hays Exchange award, he taught American culture at the University of Nice, in France from 1981 to 1983.
He has won numerous awards in his long career. Major won a Bronze Medal as a finalist for the National Book Award in 1999 for Configurations: New and Selected Poems 1958–1998. He is winner of a Pushcart Prize, and in 2002 he won the Stephen Henderson Poetry Award for Outstanding Achievement, presented by the African American Literature and Culture Society. And, as I said, in 2021 he was named to the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame.
As he once wrote, “Despite the obstacles of race and class, I was always taught that I could accomplish anything I set my mind to. African-American writers, for me, were a beacon, a guiding force.”
Through talent and hard work, he became that beacon, that guiding force for all of us. As one of last year’s other inductees into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, Jericho Brown, said of the book The Essential Clarence Major: “Clarence Major’s attention to the details particular to black life—his ability to capture the real-life surrealistic quality of these details—is only matched by his commitment to a kind of experimentation that expands and defies our ideas about the boundaries of genre. This isn’t just a book of great literature. This is a book of history.”
So, it is with great joy that I present to you, as winner of the Georgia Author Lifetime Achievement Award, Clarence Major.
Philip Lee Williams
Clarence Major is a novelist, poet and painter. Born in Atlanta, he grew up in Chicago. While still in high school he won a scholarship to the Art Institute of Chicago to study art and art history at Fullerton Hall. In 1966 he left the Midwest and moved to New York where he worked as a research analyst for Simulmatics researching bias in newspaper coverage of the riots. Major’s novels include Dirty Bird Blues (a Penguin Classic), Such Was the Season, a Literary Guild selection; My Amputations, winner of the Western States Book Award; Painted Turtle: Woman with Guitar, a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year; and One Flesh. He has contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Harvard Review, and dozens of other periodicals. He is the author of sixteen collections of poetry. His poetry was selected for inclusion in The Best American Poetry, 2019. A Fulbright scholar, he taught at the University of Nice, France for two semesters. Major won a National Book Award Bronze Medal, the Western States Book Award for fiction, a National Council on The Arts Award; in 2015 he won a “Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in the Fine Arts” from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, Washington, D. C., in 2016 a PEN Oakland/Reginald Lockett “Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Literature.” He was elected to The Georgia State Writers Fall of Fame in 2021. Before retiring in 2007 as Distinguished Professor Emeritus of twentieth century American literature and creative writing in the English Department, University of California, Davis, he taught at Sarah Lawrence College, University of Washington, Howard University, Temple University, University of California at San Diego, and other universities. He lives in northern California.